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Liberal groups were more direct in blaming the across-the-board spending cuts.

“Sequester spring is already not starting out well,” Heather Boushey, chief economist at the Center for American Progress, said in a statement. “Sharp cuts in government spending implemented March 1 are only beginning to show their ugly consequences. While it’s too early to know what the full impact will be on the unemployment rate, government spending cuts are stealing wind from the sails of the recovery.”

Federal, state and local governments shed a total of 7,000 jobs last month — a number driven primarily by steep job losses at the U.S. Postal Service.

Another contributor to the disappointing jobs figures may be the end of the payroll tax cut that American workers had enjoyed for two years. Congress and the White House quietly let the 2 percent tax holiday expire at the end of last year, meaning that a person who earns $50,000 annually will see a tax hike of about $1,000 this year.

“Certainly, it makes you think that the payroll tax might have had something to do with it,” Keith Hall, a former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said in an interview. “There really are a lot of people who kind of spend paycheck to paycheck and things like payroll taxes really affect places like Wal-Mart and K-Mart, for example. So when payroll taxes go up, spending really does tail off at the end of the pay period.”

The disappointing jobs figures will also likely encourage the Federal Reserve to continue its strategy of buying $85 billion of asset purchases per month in an effort to encourage borrowing and spending by keeping long-term interest rates low.

The previous jobs report had sent positive signals about the economic recovery, showing 236,000 jobs had been added in February and that the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.7 percent – far surpassing expectations. Those optimistic figures were revised even higher in Friday’s report, with the February job tally going to 268,000 from the initial 236,000 figure. The January numbers were also revised upward to 148,000 from 119,000.

But even before Friday, new data was tempering enthusiasm that the economy was ready to really pick up steam.

On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that the number of jobless claims was 385,000 – a surge of 28,000 from the previous week.

The drop in the March unemployment rate, which is calculated using a different survey than is used for the jobs number, was due to a slight decrease in the number of people looking for work, not because of the uptick in hiring. About 496,000 workers dropped out of the labor force last month, reducing the participation rate to 63.3 percent — the lowest since 1979.

Jobs in the retail sector took one of the biggest hits in March, with losses totaling 24,000 in the industry. In the six months prior to March, the retail sector added roughly 32,000 per month, but stores selling clothing and accessories, building and garden supplies, and electronics tallied big losses in jobs.